Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  One young woman stayed away from the scrum. She wore hot pink leggings under a mesh of torn fishnet tights, with short denim cutoff shorts on top and knee-high galoshes. Black tights covered her arms as protection from the waste and the sun; a T-shirt tied over her head draped down her back. She surveyed the scene with a keen eye, a hand on thrust-out hip, a heaping bag full of something by her side. Amid the ruin of Gramacho, she’d managed a postapocalyptic glamour, and her defiance in face of degradation around set her apart.

  Twenty-one-year-old Sueleide da Silva had learned the trade from her mother, who worked the piles of refuse for twenty-five years until she lost her eyesight to an infection contracted from trash falling from a truck. Sueleide had her first child by the time she was fourteen; by fifteen she was pregnant again, working at the dump alongside three of her sisters. None of them attended school beyond the fourth grade, but together they supported their own children and their mother.

  She had never known a life away from Gramacho. Her skills were honed to its particular demands. During the day, she explained, the catadores worked with their eyes, trained to spot the shine of glass and metals. But deliveries ramped up at night, so children learned from their parents how to differentiate materials by touch and sound, telling apart the fourteen types of recyclable plastic and the various grades of paper.

  Most of the catadores lived in lean-tos of plywood, tin, and cardboard that had sprung up a short walk from the dump. They didn’t earn much: cardboard went for 10 cents a kilo; printer paper for 13 cents if clean, 11 cents if dirty. Glass, heavy and hard to handle, fetched 14 cents. Sueleide’s specialty was printer paper. The load was lighter, and on a good day she took home $40. It was a decent living; Brazilian minimum wage was less than $300 a month.

  There had been talk of the dump’s closure for years, but it was always just that—rumors. Back in 1996, there had been some big changes. Authorities put an end to child labor and registered the catadores. Rules restricted Gramacho to taking in only household trash; industrial and hospital waste were diverted to more appropriate sites.

  Now the bosses said the closure was certain. Sueleide was skeptical. Improvements, sure, but to close Gramacho? It was a world unto itself and had offered up the soda bottles, cardboard boxes, and old magazines that, cleaned and categorized, had fed three generations of her family. She could not imagine a day when the teeming heap of possibility would no longer exist.

  The people of Gramacho, a gente de Gramacho, were afraid, Sueleide said. The state-of-the-art landfill in Seropédica had no room for catadores.

  There were provisions made for the workers. Wells were being drilled into the mound. Gases generated by decomposition were expected to generate energy and raise about $360 million over fifteen years. A portion of this would go to the workers, in addition to a lump-sum payment of $7,500. Job training was offered to the catadores. But Sueleide kept her expectations low, perhaps out of the abundance of hard knocks her short lifetime had delivered.

  One single stroke of bad luck won’t land someone in Gramacho. Motioning at the others, and perhaps thinking of her own family, she ticked off the problems: disease, domestic abuse, drug addiction, illiteracy, unplanned pregnancies . . . Her voice trailed off. Six months of job training won’t solve any of these, she said.

  “You don’t end up in Gramacho because you have options,” she said. “Most people here can’t read properly, and every job out there, they want you to have high school, college. You have people here who don’t know what to do with a pencil.”

  Places like Gramacho are reminders of the complex ways history, culture, and the economy have interacted with landscape to shape Rio. Closing down the landfill was essential to restore the marshes around it and clean up the bay, but the closure would bring difficulties far beyond replanting mangroves and restoring the crab count. I had gone hoping for a feel-good story about Rio on the mend, but left with Sueleide in mind.

  The documentary about Gramacho and the artist didn’t win the Oscar. There would be no clear-cut victories there, no neat, happy endings.

  The landfill was shut down in June 2012, less than a year after my visit. The job training was a flop, as Sueleide had predicted: most of courses required high school degrees, and the average catador had four years of schooling. Nearly half of them couldn’t read or write, as she had pointed out.

  Then the state environment secretary signed a big contract to set up a recycling center. This could work, I thought; the people of Gramacho could put their knowledge to use. I went back to look for Sueleide and her kids in the shacks near the dump, to see how they were faring. She was gone. No one knew where she’d moved, what she was doing now. She’d disappeared into the city.

  When I returned two years later to visit the recovering marshland around Gramacho, a biologist pointed out the hovering buzzards a stone’s throw from the dusty main road.

  “Another dump,” he said, explaining that illegal trash deposits often spring up in a neighborhood after one is shut down. “You can always tell because of the vultures.”

  Even as patches went up in one spot, the problems reemerged elsewhere. Hard as it was to close the dump, it was harder to change attitudes.

  How could a population of beachgoers who are so proud of their city coexist with the degradation of the very landscape that defined them? The answer lay, in part, in the Carioca approach to life, this elusive Rio Zen. They lived with an intense focus on the moment, on what was close by and immediate. They cared intensely about their homes, their friends and family, the good times to be had right here and now. But try to nail a Carioca down with plans for the weekend and you’d find the future is nebulous, whether it is tomorrow, next year, or the next generation.

  The same nearsightedness applies to public spaces; they are too distant from the individual to register as worthy of concern or protection. What belongs to everyone belongs to no one, and so construction waste is dumped on the marshes, coconut husks are left on the sand when their sweet water is gone, and candy wrappers flutter from the hand to the street, into sewers and into the ocean . . . away.

  Although there are laws that forbid littering, anyone who has ever spent New Year’s Eve in Copacabana Beach and watched the sun rise over sand fouled with beer cans, sandwich wrappers, and empty wine bottles knows this is widely disregarded. Every January 1, a legion of sweepers in bright orange uniforms gathers up to four hundred tons of trash from Copacabana’s sand.

  It took an education campaign in 2013, enforced by inspectors with the power to impose hefty fines on the spot, to make a dent in the Carioca’s littering habit. Under the new rules, flick a cigarette butt on the ground and it could cost you $75; toss a beer can and it could rack up a $200 fine. Throw an old couch or a useless TV into the bay and the fine would be over $400. This approach showed immediate results: within the first month, the waste management company reported downtown’s streets were 50 percent cleaner. It seems the fine made littering an immediate, personal concern, bringing the consequences close enough to snap Cariocas to attention. Only time would tell whether this law would sink in and become a habit and a value.

  I had moved to Rio knowing that litter and waste management were serious problems. But there was another environmental issue that caught me off guard: air pollution. During the still, dry days of winter when rain eluded the city, a brown sock of smog lay over the horizon, smudging the thin blue line between sky and ocean.

  The recipe for Rio’s pollution is particular to the place. The same topography that makes the city so pretty also makes it impossible to lay down a straight road. Traffic is forced to travel along winding ribbons of asphalt that loop around lakes and squeeze through tunnels. Add to this a car fleet that tripled in twenty years, with no significant investment in roadways, and you’ve got an idling, honking mess that pours its dirty fumes into the city daily. A survey by TomTom, the GPS manufacturer, found that Rio has the third-worst traffic
in the world, behind only Moscow and Istanbul. Indeed, the state’s environmental agency blames 77 percent of air pollution on cars and buses.

  This also means the city lauded by the UN for the quality of its outdoor life has some of the worst air in Brazil. When a World Health Organization report compared local measures of airborne particulate matter in 2011 they found Rio’s count was three times above recommended levels.

  Rio’s problem is also Brazil’s problem. Traffic is a growing problem nationally, adding to the damage done by polluting industries such as steelworks.

  The grime in the air became apparent once I had settled into my apartment. A day or two after I had mopped them, the wood floors were already covered in a slick black layer made up of the oily exhaust that wafted from buses mixed with marine spray from the ocean half a block away. Wiping this stuff up made me wonder about the inside of my lungs.

  Indeed, over the next year I went from being a healthy, once-a-season-cold type to a chronic sniffler who suffered from sore throats, sinus infections, and other respiratory problems every other week. I imagined the balloonlike alveoli in my lungs as petri dishes at the hands of some mad scientist who mixed in rubber particles from tires, soot from burned oil, and fungal spores. By this time, my furniture and clothes had arrived, and had fallen prey to one of the huge drawbacks of tropical seaside living: humidity and mold. My leather shoes, belts, and purses were soon covered in a fuzzy white layer. Useless wool jackets developed fungal bloom patterns, rhizoids grew through the spices in their jars, and the tea clumped into toxic balls.

  As the months wore on, I found myself defeated by the microscopic particles that embedded themselves in the fabric of my couch and in my lungs. I resisted leaving the apartment I’d struggled so hard to find; finding another would be hard, and there would be a hefty fine for breaking the mandatory thirty-month contract. But by the time I sneezed blood all over my computer while sitting at the front row of a press conference with the International Olympic Committee I decided it was time to leave my almost-on-the-beach place with its exorbitant rent, its mildew, and its bus fumes and find something easier on my lungs and my pocket.

  I settled in Flamengo, a residential area facing Guanabara Bay. While Ipanema had represented a certain image of Rio that I’d craved, it was this neighborhood that had served as my parents’ first foothold in the city. Its streets were lined with stately old trees and Art Deco buildings that offered soaring ceilings and a distant view of Cristo. The beach was too polluted for swimming, but that also meant cheaper rent. I fell for its muted rhythms and the elderly ladies in strings of pearls who walked their key-chain-sized dogs in the early morning.

  Plus, my new apartment faced the Morro da Viúva, or Widow’s Hill, a glorious granite dome that was enclosed by buildings on all sides but luxuriantly forested on top. Anywhere else, it would be crisscrossed with hiking trails, but in Rio it was little known outside the neighborhood and seemed diminutive compared to the twin humps of the Sugarloaf just across the bay. But thanks to its crown of trees, I finally had a picture window with a view onto swaying palms, the occasional troop of monkeys and chattering flocks of parrots.

  A jog and swim at Ipanema Beach was no longer just steps away, but this neighborhood has its own waterfront park, the Aterro do Flamengo, a greenbelt that stretches from the downtown airport of Santos Dumont, along Flamengo Beach, to the small sheltered cove at Botafogo.I

  The first time I ventured alone into the Aterro after my move, the syrupy musk of the cannonball tree’s cream-and-crimson flowers brought back one of those dormant memories that lie buried for years. I remembered myself as a toddler under these same trees, contemplating the fleshy-petaled flower that filled my hands, and the moment when I dug into its stem-filled heart and tore it apart. The smell lingered on my fingertips, a reminder of the shame that had filled me after that first conscious act of destruction. Decades later, the honeyed scent under the trees brought back that afternoon, the pang of guilt. It also closed a loop—there was something of myself in this city after all.

  My jogging route went into the park, past the cannonball trees with their extravagant flowers, to the bay’s shore, where I’d stretch and look out at the granite monolith of the Sugarloaf rising across the water, just beyond Botafogo Bay with its little slip of beach and its scores of bobbing sailboats and fishing vessels. To the left was the long stretch of white that was Flamengo Beach. At my back, Cristo soared above the high-rises.

  When traveling along South America’s shore on board the Beagle, Charles Darwin stopped in Rio de Janeiro. It was late fall in 1832. The ship had turned into Guanabara, and anchored right there, within the shelter of Botafogo. Nearby he found “a most delightful house,” and stayed for two months, walking the sand, collecting specimens, going for long horseback rides, and making notes that exclaimed on the exuberant fauna and flora.

  It was after such a ride on June 1, 1832, that, particularly taken with what he saw, he wrote in the diary: “I do not know what epithet such scenery deserves: beautiful is too tame. Every form, every colour is such a complete exaggeration of what one has ever beheld before.”

  Reading this, I thought he might have stopped where I did during my run, and looked over the water to see the oblique afternoon sun striking gold out of the Sugarloaf’s grayish pink rock, and felt lifted by the sight, much as I did.

  And yet, it was at that point that the stench of sewage became overpowering. The water in Botafogo cove, where Darwin had collected coral, was now so contaminated it had not been deemed safe for bathing in decades. Give in to temptation on a hot day—a few brave souls did—and you’d risk fungal growth on your skin, a bout of hepatitis, or the stomach cramps and diarrhea that come with an E. coli infection. The state environmental agency found the water along Flamengo Beach too polluted for human contact in about four of five tests. The Carioca River, which empties into the bay right by Flamengo Beach, runs gray and dead with sewage.

  For all of the environmental devastation I’d seen in Rio, no aspect seemed more incongruous than this rampant abuse of its waterways. That spot by the bay, with its quintessentially Carioca view and its stink, became a daily prompt: Rio, beautiful and rotten.

  * * *

  I. The Aterro do Flamengo’s origins were also wrapped in a great story. Its construction was coordinated by Lota de Macedo Soares, a daughter of the Brazilian elite and self-taught modernist who administered the park’s development while carrying on a dramatic affair with the poet Elizabeth Bishop over sixteen years. Lota dreamed up much of what makes this park unique, such as the light posts that soar 150 feet high and cast a glow like moonlight.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE FIRST CARIOCA

  Rio was born by the water, and water shaped it from the start.

  The city was founded on the narrow strip of sand between two granite peaks at the mouth of Guanabara Bay on March 1, 1565, part of a Portuguese effort to ward off the menacing French. Rio’s port was a principal connection between Brazil and the world beyond through the twentieth century. Beach culture influenced some of the most quintessentially Carioca traits—their informality of dress and manner, their ease of movement, and their comfort with their bodies.

  Natives of the state of Rio de Janeiro are known as fluminense, a word that comes to the Portuguese from the Latin flumen, for river. Those born in the city of Rio are called Carioca after the trickle of a river I ran by daily—though most would be surprised to learn this. Indeed, few know the Rio Carioca’s name, or even think of it as a river at all.

  Its banks have been cemented and, for much of its trajectory, its flow is shunted underground. By the time it reaches Flamengo Beach and empties into the bay its water is so foul that a sewage treatment plant was installed across its mouth in 2002. Anyone passing by could be forgiven for assuming that this gray, dead discharge is part of the wastewater treatment system, and not a stream born less than three miles away at
the feet of Cristo, among granite boulders and lush forests.

  The river wasn’t always a foul conveyor of waste. There was a time when Rio depended entirely on the Carioca. It was the city’s most important water source from the sixteenth century, when Portuguese sailors had relied on it to replenish their fresh water supplies, until the nineteenth century, when Rio’s needs grew beyond what it could offer. Because of its unique relationship to the city, this river first sparked local environmental awareness by making clear that abuse of the natural surroundings—the degradation of the slopes through which the river ran—could have direct and dire consequences for the population.

  Because it was Rio’s principal source of drinking water, the river’s course was legally protected through the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. Indeed, a notice concerning the Carioca issued on February 16, 1611, by the Câmara de Vereadores, the local council, may be among Brazil’s first environmental regulations: “. . . water from the Carioca will be kept clean as is required, and there will be no planting of things such as bananas and vegetables. . . . The margins along said river shall remain covered in virgin forest . . . and when use is made of said river’s water for drinking and washing clothes, this shall be done in the area set aside for it.”

  The Carioca fed Rio’s first planned drinking water delivery system in the seventeenth century. A stone aqueduct replaced it in the mid-eighteenth century, guiding the Carioca’s waters down the mountain and into the city.

  Remnants of that water delivery system are still visible, including the tall stone fountain in Praça XV square, in the historic downtown, where the populace would gather to draw water, and the elegant white Arcos da Lapa, or Arches of Lapa. Originally part of the aqueduct, the Arches carried the river’s water to the public fountains below from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century.I